“What are the Ten Days that Shook the World? They are the days of the Russian Revolution of 1917, which brought an end to the imperial rule of the czars and replaced it with communism. The title refers to the 1919 eyewitness account of the revolution by American writer and sympathizer John Reed (1887-1920).”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
OK, for my colleagues in New York City, the next time a student asks you why the Tweed Courthouse (still home to the New York City Department of Education, as far as I know) is so named, you might find useful this reading on Boss Tweed and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. William Marcy Tweed (“Boss”) incidentally, is buried under a relatively ostentatious stone in Green-wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Tweed’s middle name suggests that he is a member of, or at least a scion of, the same Marcy family that gave us William L. Marcy. Chances are good that this is how Marcy Avenue in Brooklyn got its name.
Perhaps making the connections in this lineage of people and place names would be a worthy endeavor for an inquisitive student? I’m just asking.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
Finally–and again, after the abject horror of yesterday in the United States–I’ll post this reading on reading on The Generation of ’68 and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet without further comment.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
This reading on the Lend-Lease Act guides students through this relatively complicated synthesis of diplomacy and trade during World War II. Here is the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that accompanies it.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
Rotten Rejections, Theodore Dreiser I: Sister Carrie
“…I cannot conceive of the book arousing the interest or inviting the attention…of the feminine readers who control the destinies of so many novels.”
“…immoral and badly written…the choice of our characters has been unfortunate….not the best kind of book for a young author to make his first book.”
Rotten Rejections, Theodore Dreiser II: The Titan
“If it is too strong for Harper then it would surely be too rich for us.”
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, united states history
“The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents…It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.”
Lyndon B. Johnson in a speech at the University of Michigan (1964)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities, united states history
Alright, last but not least this beautiful spring morning is this reading on the Gilded Age along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I assume I don’t need to belabor the point that this reading could very well describe our own epoch.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
It was the biggest civil engineering project in the history of the world when it was built, so it has global significance. But whenever I post something like this reading on the Brooklyn Bridge and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet, I do so with my erstwhile New York City colleagues in mind. This is as much about the Roebling family, father and son, who designed and built the bridge–did you know that the day-to-day superintendency of the project fell to Emily Warren Roebling, the daughter-in-law of John Roebling, who began construction of the Brooklyn Bridge? There’s some women’s history to be extracted from this material for the right learner.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
OK, starting out on a very gray and chilly morning considering that it is May 12, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of a capital offense. Needless to say, this clears fruitful ground for a discussion of the consequence of a conviction for a capital offense, capital punishment, i.e. the death penalty.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
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